


midas

by stevenstamkos



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Character Study, Curses, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-14 07:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14131110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stevenstamkos/pseuds/stevenstamkos
Summary: Everything that Jo touches turns to gold. For a while, at least.





	midas

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be my "I can't believe Jo is a Hab now" fic but I didn't finish it in September, so now I guess it's a birthday fic for Jo. Happy birthday you goof. Please don't read this.

Montreal wants a savior, but Jo learned long ago that he is no knight in shining armor.

 

They say that Jo was blessed at birth.

“Tu es béni, mon fils,” his mother tells him as she brushes his hair, and Jo sits very still and thinks about it, turning the word over and over in his head. Béni. _Blessed_.

It is a lot of responsibility, he decides.

“Does this mean I’m going to be good, maman?” he asks. He is talking about hockey, of course. Jo is always talking about hockey.

Even at such a young age, he plays beautifully, and everyone can see it. Every time his stick is in his hands, every time the puck lands on his tape, every time his skates touch the ice, things happen: incredible moves that no child his age should be able to complete, not unless they are destined for greatness. No wonder why people look at him and smile, with equal parts admiration and jealousy.

“It means if you work hard, you’ll get everything you ever wished for,” his mother says, and Jo believes her.

After all, everyone says that he is blessed.

 

 _come to halifax, we need you_ , Nathan writes, and Jo stares and stares at the words on his computer screen and thinks about Halifax, about the Mooseheads calling him second overall in the Q Draft after Nathan MacKinnon. Halifax is so far away, and the Lions play close to home, familiar ice. But Jo is sixteen, and there is an itch under his skin that calls him away.

He doesn't think he has ever met Nathan MacKinnon before, but he has watched him play, two months of Q hockey while Jo remained in Lac St-Louis with his midget team. He loves Lac St-Louis. They play beautiful hockey here, and Jo is a star.

But Halifax sounds good. It sounds like the road to the NHL.

And besides, the whispers that follow Jo are getting a little too loud. It would be good to leave Montreal, he thinks.

 

Jo is ten when the whispers begin to change.

He is lit up like a sun, like a star, and he cannot stop scoring. They say that he will break records, that he is already on track to become one of the best players to ever come out of Montreal. When he is sixteen, they say, he will go first overall in the QMJHL Draft.

“Do you really think you will?” one of his teammates asks him. “Go first overall, I mean?”

Jo shrugs and takes a drink from his bottle before sticking it back on the bench. “I just wanna get drafted. Don’t care when.”

He is lying. He does care. He is blessed, and everyone knows it; he _has_ to go first.

“You’re good enough to go first. You’re like, the best liney I ever had. No one else on this team even compares to you. I heard Alex’s mom say that the Lions want you to play with them when you’re old enough.”

It feels good, to hear that. _Les Lions de Lac St-Louis_. One of the best Midget AAA teams. If they want him, it means that he’s good.

Jo makes the roster for an exhibition game, paired with the best ten-year-old talents that Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia have to offer. He is put on a line with a pale round-faced boy with a bad haircut, who introduces himself as Nathan. Jo smiles at him and shakes his hand, but there isn’t much to say, not when his English is barely passable and Nathan’s French nonexistent.

They play beautiful hockey together though, the best hockey Jo has ever played. Jo can pass and Nathan can score and they are winning and winning and then—

Jo is ten, too old to cry on the ice when he skates off clutching his wrist, but it _hurts_ , and he’s never broken a bone before, but he imagines this is what it feels like: his own weight and the weight of another player crushing his wrist into the ice, sharp pain and a sickening crunch lost in the gasp that was punched out of him.

They have to wait for the swelling to go down before they can confirm, but the team doctors rattle off a list of bones and say that he’ll need to sit out a couple weeks for them to heal.

“Bad luck,” one of his new teammates’ mother says, shaking her head.

Jo swallows back the tears. He is blessed; he is supposed to be _untouchable_.

Alex’s father says, “Bad luck follows the kid everywhere. Remember the time in the finals when he was playing so well and they sent him out in the shootout and he missed every time—”

A few parents shush him, glance carefully at Jo like he will break if he hears them talking.

His mother hugs him and takes him away from the whispering, and Jo cries in the car on the way home.

 

They used to say that Jo was blessed at birth. They don’t really say that anymore.

 

The whispers follow him, from his peewee team to his bantam team to Midget AAA, about the boy who is so skilled that they say he is blessed, that they say he is cursed.

His mother takes him to a specialist, who studies the lines of his chest and stares into his eyes and asks him a lot of questions. Jo answers as truthfully as he can, heartbeat in his ears, words heavy on his tongue. Yes, he is very skilled at hockey. Yes, he has reached incredible highs and incredible lows. Yes, he knows what people say about him.

The specialist says something to Jo’s mother, and Jo’s mother hands over a wad of cash and takes Jo home.

“What did the doctor say about me, maman?” Jo asks.

His mother’s hands are tight on the steering wheel, knuckles white, and the smile that she shoots Jo doesn’t reach her eyes. He already knows what the doctor said. It’s the same thing that everyone has been saying:

 

Everything that Jo touches turns to gold. For a while, at least.

 

Nate grabs Jo by the shoulders and shakes him, screaming and laughing, and Jo yells something back and his brain is a blank mantra of _we won we won we won we won_ because they won, 16-1 and the President’s Cup is theirs.

“The Mem Cup,” Nate is yelling, and Jo repeats it, _the Mem Cup, the Mem Cup_.

The thought of winning it is dizzying.

He takes his lap with the President’s Cup, lifts it over his head and kisses it and hands it off, and the whole time he doesn’t think about the whispers back home or the doubt making a home for itself in his ribcage.

(It would be just like his curse though, wouldn’t it? To let him win the President’s Cup, to let him get close enough to play in the Memorial Cup tournament, and then snatch it all away from him?

It would be just like everything that’s ever happened to him before: the incredible thrill of a high, the sweetness of an important win, and then—

Well, the other shoe always drops, is all he’s saying.)

Nate puts his hands on either side of Jo’s face, presses his forehead to his, and Jo can count every one of his pale eyelashes, if he wanted. “You were so fucking good, that goal there, getting that rebound when I hit the post, that was incredible, I fucking love you man,” he is saying, a blur of words like he can’t get them out fast enough, and Jo blinks, face hurting with how hard he’s smiling. “I fucking love you, dude, you’re the best, I love you,” Nate says again.

Jo should say it back, he should say, “Love you too,” easy and casual.

“You’re a fucking stud,” he says instead. It’s close enough.

For now, he breathes in the taste of victory, feels Nate’s hands moving to his shoulders to pull him into a hug, sweaty and adrenaline-fueled, and he doesn’t think about what comes next.

The higher he goes, the further he falls. Gravity—like a thunderbolt that strikes him down. That has always been Jo’s curse.

 

Nate is supposed to be doing his math homework, but he is looking at the QMJHL website on his phone and trying to project point totals for the league leaders this season. Basic addition is still math, he claims.

Jo is done with his homework, is killing time on his own phone and sneaking glances at Nate.

“The scoring title’s definitely yours,” Nate says when he’s done, and Jo stares at him and hopes and hopes, because of course Nate believes in him, but Jo’s not sure if that’s enough.

He excuses himself and goes to the bathroom.

“I’m cursed,” he tells the mirror, but he can’t bring himself to say that to Nate.

No one in Halifax knows what they say about him in Montreal. For that, Jo is grateful. Here, he can be normal. He can make sympathetic sounds like everyone else when he hears about a teammate’s brother’s friend who is cursed to only speak the truth, or about a classmate’s distant relative who was born under an unlucky star. No one has to know.

The whispers haven’t followed him to Halifax, but they go on whispering in his heart anyway, reminding him.

“I’m cursed,” and the mirror Jo’s lips form those words silently, trapped.

If they knew, if _Nate_ knew, they would all run far away from him. Jo’s touch is poison, sweet on the tongue, and deadly.

He washes his hands and gets back to Nate, who is still talking about Jo’s future scoring title.

Nate is right. Jo is on track for the scoring title, more than two points per game. Jo is a fucking stud.

That night, he scores a hat trick against Rouyn-Noranda.

It is so, so easy, to get the puck on his stick, to skate around the Huskies defensemen and open up a lane to Darcy, to get the puck back on a great feed and see nothing but net. Jo feels like he is flying as he one-times it from the slot, goes backhand-forehand over the blocker, tucks it in five-hole.

This is what he was made to do.

The next game, he is flying on ice, and then—

Adam Erne is a big player, and Jo is not. Adam Erne runs him into the boards, and Jo feels the crack of his skull against the glass, so hard it makes his teeth ache, and then he is falling to the ice, knees and hands and blood in his mouth. He kneels there, feels the world spin for a moment before he has the strength to get up and wobble to the bench.

The trainers don’t need to say “concussion.” Jo can already feel it.

They lose that game in overtime, and Jo is out for three weeks, sixteen games, and he loses the scoring title at the end of the season.

 

“This dude was so dumb, like he was supposed to get out of hell before he could turn and look at his wife, but he fucked that up and she went back to hell. How stupid do you have to be to fuck that up?” Nate says.

Jo doesn’t look up from his book. “About as stupid as you, probably.”

“No way, I couldn’t do something as dumb as that. Who’d you have for your project?”

“Just some guy who turned shit to gold.”

Nate’s eyebrows shoot up in interest, and he leans over the table to get a look at Jo’s book. “Dude, that sounds kind of awesome.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

 

Midas was a king who was blessed with the power to turn all that he touched into gold. They say that he was was rich and powerful, and that he surrounded himself with glittering treasures, turned priceless by his fingertips. He sat on a golden throne in a golden palace held up by golden columns, with a golden scepter in his hand and a golden crown on his head. At his touch, ordinary things became extraordinary.

They say that he was blessed with the power to turn things to gold, but he could not eat his golden food or drink his golden wine, and he could not sleep in his golden bed.

And one day, he touched his son, and at his touch, his son turned to gold, too.

They say that Midas was a king who was cursed with the power to turn all that he touched into gold.

 

Saskatoon, 6-4 final. They win the Memorial Cup.

Nate kisses him, Mem Cup clutched in their hands, and they are giddy with the weight of it, the knowledge that they’ve reached the peak of major junior. There is nothing else for them to win, not at this level. A part of Jo still can’t believe it.

Frky hands Nate the Cup, and Nate turns and presses one of the handles into Jo’s hands, and then he leans over the Cup and kisses Jo.

They are half-naked in the locker room in Saskatoon’s rink, and there is champagne on Nate’s bottom lip.

“You’re unbelievable,” Nate says, serious for a moment, and then he’s distracted by Fourns’s attempt to climb the stalls.

Jo watches him join Fourns, and he doesn’t let himself think about Nathan’s lips or the future, the catastrophic future waiting for him, repayment for this victory of victories. He thinks instead about the fleeting feel of the Cup in his hands, cool metal against his burning palms.

He thinks, _They will write our names on it, side by side_. That is enough, isn’t it?

They win the Memorial Cup, but Tampa doesn’t want him, and Jo is sent back to Halifax to do it again. The second time around, without Nate by his side, he doesn’t.

 

 _come to halifax, we need you_ , Nate writes, a plea over Facebook Messenger to a boy who is just a name, just _Jonathan Drouin_ on a piece of paper, and Jo comes.

Jo comes to Halifax, and Nathan is there, in the car and in his classes and on his line. Nathan, with his big goofy smile and his bad hair and his duck-face selfies, his sure feet and his surer hands—god, his _hands_ , and Jo is reaching out before he knows it, because how can he not? Nate shines like a sun, warm and golden, and Jo is reaching, reaching, touches him—

Jo comes to Halifax, and that is a beginning.

 

Here is another beginning: Steve Yzerman and Jon Cooper on the stage, Tampa Bay blue and white behind them, a lightning bolt poised to strike. They say that the Lightning strike twice, and without mercy.

Steve Yzerman stands on the stage, puts his mouth to the microphone, and says, “The Lightning are proud to select, from the Halifax Mooseheads, Jonathan Drouin.”

Jo is smiling and shaking hands with Steve Yzerman and Jon Cooper, and he is wearing the blue and white of his future, and he feels, for a moment, untouchable. This is what his dreams were made of. This is where he belongs.

Third overall to a team that wants him, and Jo forgets about curses, about luck, forgets about everything but the feel of today.

 

“So, Jonathan Drouin. Memorial Cup champion, top prospect. You’re projected to go top 5 in the draft in a few weeks. Safe to say that everything you touch turns to gold. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself,” and then the mic is in his face, and the reporter is smiling at him, patient and encouraging.

Jo puts his lips to the mic, looks at the camera and says, “Well, you know, I’ve been playing hockey since I was three, and it’s been my dream all my life to play in the NHL…”

 

Maybe he is doing this wrong. Maybe he should say:

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

 

“If you got to choose your blessing, what would it be?” Nate asks, two games into the preliminary round at the 2013 World Juniors.

Jo blinks, actually stunned long enough by the question to fall silent, his rant about the super cool Russians he met earlier interrupted and already forgotten. “No one gets to choose their blessing, Nate,” he says. “That’s the whole point.”

“I know that, but just imagine if you could. I got a cousin on one side who’s supposed to be blessed with the power to cook really good pot roasts, but they never got that confirmed.”

“Really? Do they though?”

“Cook good pot roasts? Yeah. I’m thinking I want my blessing to be something like that. Just like, really good cooking skills.”

“Too unrealistic,” Jo says. “That would never happen.”

Nate hits him with a pillow, and Jo nearly falls off his bed. “I know it’s unrealistic, dude. There’s like what, a two percent chance you’re born blessed or cursed? This is just my hypothetical blessing. Knowing you though, you’d be cursed with something terribly minor and inconvenient.” Nate laughs. “Something like the inability to stop talking.”

Jo snorts and throws the pillow back in Nate’s face, and then Nate starts talking about the shit that Hubie got up to in the hotel earlier, and about the draft, and a million other topics that are on their minds this season.

And Jo stares across the bed at him, at Nate, at the one good thing that he has not yet ruined.

 

In the cosmology of things, Nathan is a sun, steady and reliable as the light it gives out every day, worshipped, beloved.

And if Nathan is a sun, then Jo is a comet or a dying star, something astronomical and uncontainable and brilliant as a supernova. He is burning so fucking bright, and for a while, everything is blinding light and heat and sensation, and then—

And then one brilliant flash as beautiful as it is temporary, and then darkness.

Jo is a dying star, and dying stars eventually burn out.

 

Ryan Strome kisses Jo in Ufa, New Year’s Eve at the end of World Junior prelims. Jo giggles into his mouth, head kind of in the clouds along with the booze inside him, and he clutches Ryan Strome’s shoulder as they kiss.

They’re drunk. Ryan is a great kisser.

And then—Stromer takes him out in the game against Russia. Jo’s head, Ryan’s hip, ice filling Jo’s vision. Or maybe that’s not ice, because he’s laying on his back, and the rafters are above him. He blinks.

It’s instinct more than anything that has him rolling over, and he takes a moment to blink the last spots from his eyes before getting up and skating slowly back to the bench.

One kiss. One fucking brain-rattling hit from his own teammate. He tastes blood in his mouth.

“You okay?” Nate asks, shuffling past several bodies to get to him. He trades places with Stromer until he’s next to Jo.

“Just a little shaken. I’ll skate it off next shift. I’m fine.” The trainers don’t even need to look at him, not really.

Nate nods and bumps Jo’s elbow with his own, focusing on the ice.

Jo tucks his arms in, pulls away from Nate and makes himself small on the bench until he’s sent back over for his next shift. He doesn’t think about why he didn’t kiss Nate during New Year’s.

 

Somewhere in between losing the Cup finals in June and the plane ride to Syracuse in January, Tampa stops loving Jo.

It was kind of inevitable, Jo thinks.

He skips out on a Crunch game and is already halfway back to Montreal when he hears that the Lightning have suspended him. He’s two-thirds of the way to Montreal when the first tweets calling him a bust pop up on his twitter.

 

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

He fucked up. He always, always fucked up. It was in his blood.

 

The Avalanche are in Washington, and they are being taken apart by Alex Ovechkin like a badly made child’s toy. This is a pretty common occurrence, for both Alex Ovechkin and the 2016-2017 Colorado Avalanche.

Nate is riding a three-game point streak, and he is the only good thing about the Avalanche this week. Jo is watching him on the PK as he gets in the Caps’ shooting lane, and Nate goes down on one knee to block the shot.

It happens too fast for Jo to see clearly, but he does see Nate get up and skate slowly to the bench, and then he sees Nate walking down the tunnel with a trainer, arm cradled close to his chest, and he does not see Nate come back out.

Jo is in Newark, the Lightning on a roadie through the New York metro area, and he’s hours from Nate. His phone is dead.

 

“Sprained wrist,” Nate says, and then he laughs, like this is funny. “Should’ve learned how to block a shot properly.”

Jo’s fingers are white around the edges of his phone, holding on too hard.

“That bad?”

“I mean, we’re close to the end now, and there’s no way we make the playoffs.” Nate laughs again, that raw undercurrent of bitterness. “I’ll miss some time, probably three or four weeks. Might make it back for the very end of the season, but there’s no rush. We’re not going anywhere. Hate to say this, Jo, but I can’t wait for this shit season to be over.”

Jo swallows down the words, feels his pulse racing too-fast as he listens to Nate’s voice.

“You okay, Jo? You sounded funny when you called.”

He bites his tongue, so Nate doesn’t hear the words rising up inside him, spilling over like water over the edge of a glass that’s gone too full, and there’s sharp and painful pressure in his mouth, a tooth pressed hard into the softest part of his tongue, and Jo—

“I did that,” Jo says, and his heart is a maddening beat of _Nate, Nate, Nate_ , because Jo did that. He touched Nate, put his fingers all over Nate’s life, and Nate is rising so fucking high and Jo knows that the higher you go, the farther you have to fall.

Nate’s voice is light, confused. Almost teasing. “Uh, you did what?”

“Your wrist,” and Jo’s voice is hoarse and tired with the years of bad fucking luck, years of it, and that stupid curse at the root of it all, “and the whole fucking season, I don’t know. Everything. It’s the curse. I fucked up, Nate. I shouldn’t have.”

“What are you talking about, Jo? Hey Jo?”

“You were in Tampa last week, for the game, and we caught up. We uh, we grabbed dinner, you hung out at my place till late, and I shouldn’t have, I _knew_ I shouldn’t have, but I missed you and—”

He drops his phone to press the heels of his palms to his eyes, squeeze out the pressure.

Nate’s voice is still coming from the phone. He’s calling Jo’s name, loud and kind of scared now.

Jo picks it up and holds it to his ear. “I have to—I’ll call you back, Nate.”

“Jo, what the fuck is goin—”

Jo hangs up. He doesn’t know what else to do.

 

“Tu es béni, mon petit champion,” his mother says as she touches his face gently.

Jo pulls away, pulls back so she’s not touching him anymore. No one should touch him. Not if what everyone is saying is true. “Non, maman,” he says, wide eyes, stubborn mouth, ten years old, old enough to hear the whispers. “Ce n’est pas vrai. Je suis maudit.”

 

Here is one

more

beginning

(for now).

 

Steven Stamkos lives and breathes Lightning hockey, and he knows everything about everyone on the team. It’s his job to know. He is still on the exercise bike when Jo gets off the ice, one of the last ones left, and saddled with the job of cleaning up the pucks after practice. Jo is not a rookie anymore. But that’s just the way it is.

“Something on your mind?” Stammer asks, casual, like he doesn’t know.

Jo drops his practice jersey in the bin and heads for the showers. “No,” he says.

 

That is it. Except not really.

 

His phone vibrates against his leg, probably another text from Nate, but Jo ignores it in favor of finishing his dinner. Stammer is paying, which is nice. It’s a good dinner. Steak, even. The good kind, expensive. 8 year contract extension kind of steak.

“You don’t play like you’re cursed,” Stammer says.

“What?” Jo says around a mouthful of steak. He swallows and takes a sip of his water.

Stammer is studying him, piercing blue eyes, and Jo feels like he is being cut open by his captain’s eyes. He half-wonders if Steven Stamkos could know what he’s thinking, if Steven Stamkos could be blessed.

“You said that you’re cursed, cause everything that’s good in your life quickly becomes bad.”

“Yeah.”

Stammer shrugs and stabs at his salad. “I’m just saying, you don’t play like you’re afraid. People who are afraid don’t take risks like you do, and they certainly don’t get drafted third overall.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know, Jo.”

“I don’t.”

When Jo doesn’t say anything more, Stammer sighs and puts his fork down. “Walk me through it again. You have really good things happen and then really bad things immediately follow, right? Like, I’m talking getting drafted and sent back, getting hurt during key moments, that kind of stuff.”

Jo nods and cuts into another piece of steak.

“Okay. So I think—”

“And your leg,” Jo blurts out. “Your knee; it’s March and we’re so close to the playoffs but we’re not _in_ , and it’s supposed to be the season you lead us to the Cup, right after that big contract you signed this summer…”

He falls silent, and Stammer is quiet for a really long moment.

“I just—I got it all back. I got back into Coop’s good books, and everyone welcomed me back to Tampa after the whole...you know. Suspension. And I got to play for Team North America at the World Cup. Everything was—good. I knew that there was gonna be something though, thought it’d be _me_ getting hurt, and then game 17 against the Wings and you fell and it looked like _nothing_ at first but…”

His voice goes out again, and he puts down his fork and knife.

Stammer wets his lips with his tongue, looks away and makes a face at the wall before looking back. “Jo, I got injured long before you made the team,” he says gently. “November 2013, against the Bruins. My tibia. I’m sure you know. You were in Halifax that season. And the playoffs last year, the blood clot. You were still in Syracuse when the team doctors found out I had to get the surgery.”

Jo stares at his hands. “I don’t…”

“If that’s what you’re beating yourself up over…” Stammer sighs and puts a cherry tomato in his mouth, chewing slowly. “All I’m saying is, curses are rare. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. I don’t know, Dru.”

“I am. I’ve seen specialists. My mom took me to—”

“Oh come on, you think there aren’t a million ‘specialists’ out there who won’t take your mom’s money and tell you whatever they want? After my tibia, I went to one, and they said that it was my destiny to never play hockey again. Said it was written in like, the lines of my chest or whatever. That they could read that my career was over. I paid ‘em couple thousand bucks for that news.”

Jo shuts up.

Stammer goes on. “It’s all pretty wonky stuff, blessings and curses. I don’t think anyone really understands it, like who does or doesn’t have it. The—The—You know, the one person who never fucks up when they type on their phones even though those keypads are tiny, or the person who always finds a parking spot during rush hour, or—”

Jo remembers something that Nate said years ago, back in Hali. “Or someone who cooks a perfect pot roast.”

“Exactly. You know what I mean. The little magic. The blessings and curses. I don’t know.” He gives Jo a little smile. “We’re probably all just fucking blind idiots bumbling around trying to find answers and assigning meaning to meaningless things in life.”

“That’s...actually really deep, Stammer.”

“Yeah, I know.” Stammer blows out a breath and takes a long drink from his glass. “I should be fucking paid for this. Free therapy.”

Jo does not mention that Stammer is making eight and a half mil a year. His phone buzzes again.

 

“I called your mom,” Nate says when Jo finally answers his FaceTime call.

“You called my _mom?_ ”

“Yeah well, what else was I supposed to do? You totally freaked out on me and then wouldn’t answer any of my texts this whole week.”

He has a point. Jo is good at disappearing, at leaving. He did it so well in Syracuse.

“Sorry,” he says, and then shakes his head. “You called my _mom_.”

“Yeah, and she explained. About the curse and everything. You never told me.” And before Jo can come up with an excuse for why he never shared this with his best friend, Nate says, “I get it though. I get why you didn’t tell me. Your mom told me about all the people who used to talk about you, you know, sad little cursed boy.”

Jo looks at the grainy visual of Nate on his phone, and he feels something snap inside him, the thousands and thousands of hushed words and furtive looks over the years, the whispers, the promise that _they knew, they all knew, it was said, and because it was said, it must be true_. The boy who was cursed. It was always Jo, always, the words a relentless pressure in his head and in his heart.

They used to say that he was cursed. Jo believed it. It’s all he’s ever known.

“But just so you know, whenever we talked about like unlucky stars and stuff, I never thought about you like that at all,” Nate says.

“I just think that’s kind of cocky of you, taking credit for all my hard work. Like, _I_ sprained my wrist and you take the credit?” Nate says.

“I never thought that you were cursed,” Nate says. “And anyway, I’m not scared of any curses.”

He is cradling his hurt wrist and looking very stupid while doing it, snapback crooked on his head, and Jo loves him.

“So,” Nate says. “Like, fuck the haters who think they know you. What do _you_ want?”

 

“So, Jonathan Drouin. what do you want?”

“Honestly? I’m happy to be drafted anywhere. It’d be an honor to go to any NHL team.”

 

“What do you want, Jonathan?”

“Obviously I’m a hockey player; I want to play hockey. These past few weeks sitting out were hard. I just want to return to Syracuse, help the Crunch, see where it goes from there. I mean, obviously I’d love to get recalled by the Lightning, but I’m grateful for the opportunity that Steve Yzerman gave me, to return to the organization…”

 

“What do you want, Jo?”

“I just want to not be cursed, maman. I want—to play for the Lac St-Louis Lions when I turn fourteen, and get drafted to the Q when I’m sixteen, but I can’t if I’m cursed, can I?”

 

“So I’m just gonna ask you. What do you want?” Stammer asks.

And Jo wants—He wants to be okay, to be normal, to live life without waiting for the axe to fall. He wants a fucking redemption arc after his shit luck so far. Little cursed boy figures this shit out and stops being so fucking cursed. He says as much.

Stammer doesn’t like it. “Your life isn’t a narrative, though, you know? I know people wanna write you like a narrative, people will always wanna write you as a narrative, but you’re not a fucking story, Jo. Sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen and maybe sometimes the bad outweighs the good, but it’s not—This isn’t a fucking story. You’re not someone’s goddamn fairy tale character. No one gets to write your future but you, and it doesn't have to be some kind of—some end-of-the-chapter redemption arc.”

His eyes bore into Jo’s. “You can’t listen to what people say about you all the time, Dru. You’ll never be happy if you do.”

“So you don’t think I’m cursed.”

“I don’t know. You could be. But what I do know is that if you’d let it control every part of your life, then you wouldn’t be eating $90 steak on my bill while playing on the best team in the NHL.”

Jo puts another piece of steak in his mouth so he doesn’t have to answer.

Across from him, Stammer has given up on the salad and ordered a steak for himself. He leans forward and puts his arms on the table after the waiter is gone. “You told me tonight that you’re cursed. I think what you want is a reason to stop believing it.”

 

Jo thinks about Halifax, thinks about a Facebook message when he was sixteen, _come to halifax, we need you_ , and he knows what he wants, what he has always wanted, at least since he was sixteen. Maybe just as much as he wanted the NHL.

 _come to halifax_ —And god, maybe that was a little bit of magic in itself.

He looks at Nate’s face, goofy and hopeful on the screen of his phone, and he knows.

They say that everything that Jo touches turns to gold, precious and priceless for one fleeting moment.

Here’s the thing though: Nate was gold all along.

 

“I want—” Jo says.

Nate is smiling. He knows, too. Maybe he has always known.

“I’m gonna need a signed love confession in person when we see each other this summer,” he says. “This FaceTime stuff doesn’t count.”

“Not happening,” Jo tells him, doesn’t miss a beat.

 

They say a lot of things about Jo, have for years. They say that he is blessed. They say that he is cursed. They say that—

They say—

They say—

They say—

“Who gives a fuck what they say?” Nate says. He is grinning at Jo, eyes bright and fierce, and Jo looks at him and his heart aches.

Faith. Because Nate has always had faith in Jo, even when the world didn’t, even when Jo didn’t.

“Yeah,” he echos softly, feels the word spread through him like liquid courage, like hot chocolate on a cold day or alcohol on a cold night, and it tastes like champagne on Nate’s lips the night they won the Memorial Cup. “Who gives a fuck what they say?”

 

Here is the thing about curses: you have to believe in them for them to be real.

 

His trade is bittersweet, but mostly sweet. Tampa was never right for Jo, and Jo is coming home, back to Montreal, to the place where he grew up, the place that shaped him. He loves Montreal, and he loves the Canadiens. They are his past and his future.

Still. Montreal.

Sixteen years of whispers, whispers that he bore heavily in his heart for years after he left. He doesn’t know if they will still remember.

And there will be a different kind of whispering in Montreal, now that he is grown and in the NHL. A kind that goes on between beat reporters, in the locker room and on the Internet, on twitter and reddit threads and on Habs forums. It can run a man out of town, and it can be merciless.

But. “Who gives a fuck what they say?” Nate says, and Jo’s heart swells with love as he kisses him, and he doesn’t stop kissing him.

He doesn’t think about gold, these days. Not anymore.

 

So, I guess: one final beginning.

 

Montreal wants a savior, but Jo is not their knight in shining armor.

Jo is just Jo. He cannot control a team’s destiny, but he can control his own.

 

Maybe he should say:

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

And he decided he was going to live happily ever after.


End file.
